Originally Posted by
mrp20
i have two related questions, that i was recently wondering myself..:
pre-approved offers "cost" a hard inquiry when you take them (at least in my experience), but if you manage to apply for another citi card on the same day that you accept a pre-approved citi offer, does anyone know if this might create another potential "two-for-one" with citi in terms of counting two hard inquiries as one, separate from the various other known visa/amex AA card strategies or using the "two-browser method"?
second, does anyone know if accepting a pre-approved offer from Citi allow you to violate the 60-65day/90-95day application spacing rules that Citi applications are generally subject to? in other words, if i would normally have to wait two months to apply for more citi cards, would accepting a pre-approved offer allow me to wait only one month since my last application? i suspect it's unlikely that someone would have a still-valid pre-approval offer within the app spacing window period, but would be grateful if anyone has any experiences they can share..
There are accounts which would answer your second question scattered in this thread:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...nks-first.html
but with the size of that thread, "scattered" is an understatement. Good luck on finidng them quickly!
(You could "serach this thread", but the trick there is to find the right word or word combination that will turn up these kinds of reports without turning up
that much else.)
As for the combining of Citi pulls, it depends on how "different" the cards are. Two Citi AA cards combine in one pull (per bureau*). Two Citi HH cards combine one pull (per bureau). But a Citi AA card and a Citi HH card may not combine in one pull, because they look "too different" to the bureau. (It's the bureau that does the combining of pulls that it thinks look "so similar" they might be duplicates. In other words, as far as I understand, the combining of pulls is ismply a side-effect of the bureaus' attempts to not put dupilcate pulls accidentally into your report. I guess it's hard for a bureau to tell apart two legitimate pulls for "too similar" a card, from a duplicate pull. And I guess dupicate pulls sometimes happen, and often enough that the bureaus want to eliminate them from your report.)
*I have to clarify that pulls are only combined "per bureau", not across bureaus, because someone posted recently in another thread "why did I get two pulls with my two-browser trick" when it was actually the case that they had gotten only one pull per bureau (as should happen), but Citi had pulled from two (of the three) bureaus. And Citi can pull from however many ahd whichever bureau(s) they feel like, and apparently they feel like making that somewhat unpredictable!